


Lightning Rod

by bamboozledone



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Cruelty to Animals, F/M, Pseudo-Incest, Sociopathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-22
Updated: 2012-10-22
Packaged: 2017-11-16 19:37:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/543103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bamboozledone/pseuds/bamboozledone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even when she’s ten years old, Kate is good with death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lightning Rod

**Author's Note:**

> Chris Argent is the best thing on 'Teen Wolf', hands down. Also, J.R. Bourne should be in everything, always. 
> 
> Warnings for pseudo-incest, infidelity, animal cruelty, and Kate Argent generally being a very legitimate sociopath. 
> 
> Mistakes are my own, though the characters? Not so much.

Christopher is ten when his parents bring her home, a swath of purple fleece wrapped around a pink body with green eyes and dark blonde hair. She babbles in his mother’s arms, her chubby little hands waving in the air as Chris peers down at her. 

“Her name is Katherine,” his father tells him while he grasps at one of her toes, kisses it and laughs when the baby coos. “Her mother died when she was born and her father didn’t want her.” 

“We’ll give her a good life, Chris,” his mother assures him, and Chris nods, eyes wide when Katherine giggles at a stuffed dog toy in her hands.

\---

The transition from Katherine to Kate is quick and quiet. One minute Chris’s mother is gushing over her baby Katherine, dressed in bright pink shoes with a constant smile on her face, and the next his father is talking about his little girl Kate, who has a penchant for bows and arrows and switch blades. 

\---

When Kate is eight years old, she kills the neighbor’s cat with a butcher’s knife and leaves the gutted pieces of the carcass along the pavement in front of their house. Chris buries the remainder of the body in the backyard, and he promises her that he won’t tell their parents if she doesn’t. She gives him this look like he’s stupid or something, and then cleans the stainless steel blade with the hem of her white dress. 

\---

Chris Argent is not a naturally violent or indifferent human being. He hates death, and believes he always will. He cried when he first shot a deer in the woods behind his house. When he got home, his father hit him with the broad side of his shotgun until Chris bled on the ground. It doesn’t get easier, and Chris still gets a little queasy when he sees his father or mother with blood on their hands and a gun at their hip, but, over time, it does it better. 

Even when she’s ten years old, Kate is good with death. Chris thinks she may be better with death than she is with living. 

\---

Chris marries Victoria Letourneau when he’s twenty-one because she has short hair and dark eyes and doesn’t laugh or smile when he makes jokes. She’s five years older than he is, and thinks he’s too soft to be an effective Hunter, but she comes from one of the newer Hunting families and is eager to parley a marriage to an Argent into a social stepping stone. She is cruel and bitter and is a menace with a knife and poisons. His father approves and gives Chris his blessing, and they all go on Hunting trips together like they are an acceptable substitute for a family vacation.

Kate hates Victoria. She publicly threatens to slit her throat once or twice, and Chris doesn’t laugh because he’s not sure that Kate is kidding.

\---

Chris has a hard time thinking of Kate as his sister. The ten years that separate them might as well be a hundred for all the time they spend together. Chris is off at school when she is young, and even though he and Victoria still live in the Argent house, Kate spends most of her time taking lessons from his father whenever Chris is home, and he even more rarely sees her once Allison is born. 

When Kate started kindergarten, she brought home a picture she drew in crayon of her family. It was her and their parents, all smiling with red mouths in front of the Argent home. Chris wasn’t in the picture, and it bothered him for a couple hours after he first saw it. 

In the end, it doesn’t matter how Chris feels about Kate. They are both Argents, and that is enough. 

\---

Kate is thirteen and already dangerously gorgeous. Her hair falls in long waves down the side of her face and she wears tight-fitting jeans and shirts that she covers with leather jackets and hooker boots. Chris wishes his father would say something, maybe remind her that she’s still a little girl who should be playing with dolls and thinking about cute boys rather than learning which gun cleaner makes the barrel squeak and shift when she shoots. 

They come back to the Argent house from a Hunt in Oregon, and Chris is putting new dressings on a deep welt on his arm that an Omega left. The antiseptic stings and he hisses as he walks up the stairs to his and Victoria’s part of the Argent house. 

He doesn’t notice her until he’s shut the door. Kate flops down on the center of his bed, her skirt bunching up around her thighs until he sees the edge of her black underwear. “You’re a failure, you know that?” She looks at the ceiling, not at Chris when she speaks. “Can’t do anything on a Hunt right. Can’t get a job other than Hunting. Can’t even get out of your parent’s house.” 

The last two parts, at least, are not true. Chris is the top of his graduating college class with offers from a dozen different universities to do doctoral work. He won’t take any of the offers, nobody in the Argent family ever does, but it’s nice to know that he’s wanted for more than his ability to fire a gun or shoot an arrow.

She pushes up next to him, looks at the dressings and the blood as it seeps through the white fabric. “Pathetic,” she spits out, dragging her nails down his bicep before she leaves. 

\---

He and Victoria have moved a couple houses down the road by the time Kate is fifteen, since a screaming toddler like Allison was no longer welcome in the Argent stronghold. Chris is relieved, happy that Victoria finally agreed to leave his childhood home for a chance at something they can build together. She doesn’t love him, but he wants to make a life with her anyway, removed from the steady sound of knives being sharpened and guns being loaded. 

Kate is there one afternoon, when Victoria is picking up Allison from the day care center a town over. She’s sitting at the table, sipping from a white china cup, her legs swinging back and forth under the table like she’s seven years old again. She’s done this before, shown up unannounced and picked through their meager cupboard, and Chris normally goes about his business as if she’s not there at all.

This time, however, she’s topless.

When she sees him, she puts down the cup and rushes over to him, her blonde curls trailing over her breasts. “Come on,” she says sharply, pulling at his shirt with one hand at the top button of his jeans with another. “Come on, Chris.” 

Chris pushes her back, careful to only touch her shoulders. “What the hell are you doing, Kate?”

“What you need, right?” she replies. Her hands keep moving on his jeans despite the distance he’s put between them. “What you’ve always needed.” 

“Kate, I’m not…” He struggles for the words, flushing as he notes his own arousal spiking. “We’re not…” 

She finally meets his eyes, blue on green, and drops her hands. He can practically smell the embarrassment on her. “My mistake,” she bites out, pulling on her bra and walking out the front door like nothing’s happened at all. “It won’t happen again.” 

\---

She’s sixteen and dating some sucker from the high school’s football team who calls her Katie and gives Kate his Letterman jacket. Chris has to take pictures of on Senior Prom night when his parents leave the town to track a pack down in Omaha with some of the extended family. Kate wears a black dress that barely covers her breasts, and Chris is forced to watch as she puts her blood red fingernails all over the jock, just this side of obscene. 

“Don’t wait up!” she calls to Chris as her date tugs her hand. She blows a kiss, her ruby lips puckering in the dim evening light. He doesn’t miss the way her tongue flicks out over her bottom lip, drags along her mouth as she steps into the limousine 

\---

Kate isn’t exactly subtle when she’s seventeen. She buys boxes of condoms and personal lubricant and leaves it all scattered around the Argent house. She talks about sex like she’s talking about the weather, and Chris lives with what feels like a constant throbbing in his dick, a constant reminder of the way Kate bends over in her jeans and brushes up against him as they wash dishes together in Chris’s home while Victoria reads to Allison in the study. 

\---

The difference between his father and Kate is that Kate likes watching people die.

His father likes the killing itself. He likes pulling the trigger, tensing the bow, digging the blade in, but he doesn’t like being there when something goes from living to not living. Kate likes watching the life drain out, slowly if at all possible. She doesn’t have to be the one doing it to get off on it, which is why her string of her boyfriends trend toward the sadistic, most of them former special ops who miss the dark rooms where torture and mayhem is the rule, not the exception.

Chris remembers one time, when Kate was nineteen, when she kept a little girl who had bitten and killed a shop keeper outside San Jose in a thorny vice. Chris could hear the screams from two houses over, and he and Victoria were left to clean up the room afterword, blood streaked across the walls and pooled on the floors. 

\---

His mother dies during a Hunt. It’s Kate’s fault. Her bloodlust and inexperience with her weapon of choice gets the best of them, and she’s reckless against a pack filled with vicious Betas and a ruthless Alpha when she ought to show caution and restraint. His mother gets mauled by a stray Beta ten minutes into the fight. Victoria gets hurt too, ends up in a hospital bed with an IV drip and a breathing machine. 

“Why did you bring her into our home?” Chris demands of his father at the funeral. It’s raining and they’re burying his mother on the edge of the Argent property line. There are at least a hundred Hunters in attendance, all who have varying degrees of relevance to Chris’s life. Some are sympathetic, but most are clearly anything but. His family may be the most powerful Hunting family, but power has not come without some like-minded enemies. They all treat Chris like crap because he’s seen as weak and undeserving of the family name. 

“Why did you need another child?” Chris says as the pall bearers pass his father. “You already had an heir to the Argent name, why did you bring Kate in as a second?” 

“We knew you weren’t man enough,” his father says lightly. “Knew you couldn’t handle the Argent name the way you were meant to, so we tried again with Kate. And we succeeded the second time around.” He shakes off his umbrella, the rainwater catching Chris in the eye. “I won’t apologize for looking out for our family’s legacy, Christopher.” 

His father’s words shouldn’t sting after all these years, but they do anyway.

\---

Kate leaves Beacon Hills for awhile. She doesn’t go to college because she doesn’t want to, even though she’s just as smart as, if not smarter than Chris is. He doesn’t really know where she goes, and doesn’t really want to. When she comes back for Christmas a year later, her hair is longer, her cheeks rosier, and there’s a scar the length of a hand that cuts across her forearm. Nobody asks where she’s been because she’ll just lie about it anyway. 

“Miss me?” she asks him on Christmas Eve. She hands him a small blue box wrapped with a white ribbon and presses her lips to his neck when nobody is looking. 

“No,” he lies, and puts the box under the unlit Christmas tree. 

\---

He hasn’t seen her in two years when she shows up again, naked in his bed, legs spread, and fingers moving down the line of her stomach. 

He shrugs off his leather jacket, puts his gun into the locked bottom drawer. Her nudity doesn’t faze him anymore. This is not the first time she’s shown up uninvited without her clothes on. Chris thinks vaguely that she must have stalked the house, just waiting for a moment when Victoria and Allison were away before she came in and stripped.

“Put this on,” he says, shoving his robe into her arms. “And get out.” 

She doesn’t argue. He’s turned her offers down a hundred times over the years, and she knows by now that pushing just makes him shut down, ignore her while she screams in his face, threatens to tell Victoria. She pulls on the underwear he throws her, sheer and blue. Chris sees her pulling it up in the reflection from the mirror and doesn’t avert his eyes like he normally does. He’s tired of pretending that he’s not attracted to her, so he doesn’t. 

“The offer is always on the table,” she says as she closes the door. She leaves the bra on his chair, draped over his jacket. It’s an invitation. “You know that.”

\---

He sees Derek Hale for what he is, something disposable and, ultimately, harmless. 

The Hale family as a whole is not necessarily harmless in Chris’ eyes, but Derek is still a kid, with little traces of baby fat still clinging to the sides of his face and stomach. He’s something like sixteen, with a stupid jock haircut and bright eyes and he reeks of sincerity and unadulterated yearning. Chris sees pictures of him in the paper every so often, intellectually gifted, athletically talented, and generally the kind of boy that every mother hopes her little girl brings home for dinner. 

Chris knows that Kate’s screwing him. She likes pretty things, precious stones and fine silks, and Derek Hale is no exception. For all the youth and innocence that Derek encompasses, he’s still tall and lanky and has enough stubble to make him dark and handsome. Chris catches them once or twice making out in her car in the driveway of the Argent house, and Chris tries not to think about the fact that Derek is barely old enough to have a driver’s license. 

He sees Derek alone once, picking up soda and gum at the 7-11 with some of his friends, and when Derek gets caught up at the cash register, the teller fumbling for some coins he dropped on the ground, Chris walks up behind Derek and grips at his side until he twitches.

“Stay away from her,” Chris growls, like Derek’s the one who could break Kate, and not the other way around. 

\---

He goes to this little diner on Main Street on nights when he can’t handle things at home with Victoria. He buys a cup of coffee and a plate of hash browns for three dollars and sits in a little corner booth by himself until his mind stops racing.

Laura Hale works there, part-time, while she’s finishing her last year of high school. Laura is eighteen and beautiful and they talk about how she’s going off to college next year, someplace down South where it’s warm. She’s thinking Houston or New Orleans or even Nashville, if she somehow manages to get into Vanderbilt. She’s nervous about telling her parents, though, since nobody leaves California from their pack, but she’s already being offered scholarships and she knows that they’ll support her if she can prove that she can make it on her own financially.

“You should do what feels right,” he tells her one night, as she brings him another refill on his black coffee that she will never put on his bill. “You can’t let your family dictate your life forever, Laura. You have to make your own decisions at some point.” 

She smiles when her hand brushes his. “You’re a good guy,” she says quietly. “Really, I thought all Hunters were just crazies with guns and a God complex.”

“Most are,” he admits. ”It’s in their nature.” 

“But you’re not like them.” Her fingers grasp at his, and the cup of coffee is quickly forgotten. “And that’s what matters.” 

\---

Allison adores Kate.

Of course she does: Kate is funny and smart and dotes on Allison like she’s her long-lost little sister. She buys her expensive toys and pretty dresses and gives her knife throwing lessons when Allison turns seven. Allison is clearly smitten with every word that comes out of Kate’s mouth, and she follows her around like some lovesick little puppy. 

“It’s good for her to have a positive role model,” Victoria says when Chris voices his concerns over Kate teaching Allison how to shoot a crossbow. What Victoria really means to say is that it’s good that Allison has somebody to look up to who isn’t Chris, someone not so soft and malleable to his emotional whims. 

\---

Chris is sick to his stomach when the Hale house burns down. He hears about it in the newspaper before he sees the damage, the once beautiful house still smoldering days later when Chris drives by. He recalls being young and running around in the woods that protected the house, watching curiously as little dark-haired children darted in and out of the windows. He misses their voices when he goes running by himself.

Laura Hale shows up at his front porch about a week after the fire. He sees her car, an old model pickup truck, in the driveway. The back is filled to the brim with what Chris assumes are the only possessions the Hales still own. A despondent Derek sits in the front, staring out the passenger’s side window. 

When Chris really looks at her, he can see the wear and worry clear in her face. Her eyes are bloodshot and dark circles hang all over her face. Derek doesn’t look any better from this distance, and Chris wonders if they’ve been living in her pickup since the fire.

“Was it you?” she asks softly, her arms wrapped around her midsection, like she’s cradling a child. 

Chris shakes his head, extending his hands as Laura moves forward. “No, Laura. No, it wasn’t.” 

She puts her head to his chest, and he holds her there. “I’m sorry,” he says as he holds her tighter, and pretends not to notice when she begins crying, the tears warm and salty on his skin. 

\---

It’s customary in the Argent family for a child to have his or her First Kill when they turn twelve. Chris was excused because his twelfth birthday coincided with a Hunting trip where he got a nasty scratch from a violent Alpha. His father tried to push him for first a Kill later that week but, in a fit of good will, his mother told him that he didn’t have to. 

When Allison turns twelve, Victoria brings home a black binder filled with pictures of a group of teenagers dressed in tattered clothing. There are a couple print articles about local animal attacks and editorials from watchdog groups claiming that they’ve been seeing larger than average sized coyotes in the area. 

“Rogue pack in Madison,” she explains as she traces her fingertips over the newspaper articles. “Barely anything resembling leadership. They’ve taken out a couple older citizens in town and they’ve been maiming some of the youth when they leave school property to walk home. They’re practically feral at this point.” 

“Proof?” Chris asks, sipping his coffee. 

“Chris, we’ve been on Hunts for a lot less.” 

Chris puts down the wine glass he’s been nursing for half the night. “Victoria, I need you to step back and think about this for a second.” He steels himself, clenches his hands together beneath the table. “Do you think she needs this?”

“Tradition, Chris,” Victoria reminds him as she takes a seat across from him at the table. The binder remains open to a picture of a half-eaten geriatric in gruesome glory. “They’re very important in our line of work.” 

“No,” Chris says. He’s been working himself up to this for years, since Allison was five and won a stuffed panda bear at a carnival. Since then, he promised himself that he would stop her before the Kill. “I won’t have my daughter involved in any of this. Fuck the traditions, Victoria.” 

“She’s going to have her Kill,” Victoria promises simply. “Your father has already booked the plane tickets, and he’s called in the locals for backup.” She smiles. “Gerard even bought her a new bow.”

“If you for her to do this, I’ll divorce you. And I’ll take Allison with me. You’ll never see her or my family again.” 

Victoria’s face drops for a moment, and Chris takes primitive little thrill in seeing her so surprised. There are few moments when he can get the drop on his wife these days, and it’s nice to know that he still has some sort of control over his life and the people in it.

“I have the papers, Victoria. Already filled out, just need to be signed and filed. I have the money, and I have the job. You think they’ll let Allison stay with a destitute woman with fetish for sharp things?” 

Victoria’s eyes turn wicked, but Chris can see the fear seeped into their depths too. “You wouldn’t do that. No other Hunter would have you.” 

Chris snorts into his coffee mug. “I can survive on my own. You? You’re nothing without the name. A mediocre Hunter with a bad temper and a worse shot. Nobody else is going to marry you, Victoria. All that notoriety you’ve gained will be gone in a day, maybe two.” 

The conversation devolves into a full-out fight from there. When Victoria starts shouting and throwing things, Allison walks into the room, her little eyes wide with concern, and she begins to cry. Victoria’s in such a bad state that Chris has to stop and drive Allison over to his father’s house, and when he gets back, Victoria is gone.

“Fine,” she says later, as she climbs into bed beside him. “Have it your way.” 

It’s a tentative treaty, aided by the Dissolution of Marriage papers Chris keeps in the desk drawer in his study. The weapons training stops immediately. Visits with Kate are limited to normal social activities like movies and shopping, which means that Kate almost never sees Allison outside of extended family functions. 

Victoria still slips Hunting things into Allison’s life here and there. She gives Allison French lessons on the side and occasionally passes her storybooks about wolves and Hunters that Allison doesn’t read. Chris doesn’t mind too much, but he tries to steer Allison toward other things instead, like poetry and photography, with varied results. 

\---

For five years after that, they bounce across the continent. They spend a month in Houston, a week in Philadelphia, a couple days in Nashville, and Chris thinks about Laura constantly, imagining that they’ve eaten dinner in the same cafes or had coffee in the same Starbucks. There’s a stretch of time when Allison is fourteen where Chris and Victoria and their daughter live in a high rise in Vancouver and Victoria picks up a little accent that Chris thinks is adorable. Vancouver is good for all of them, less Hunting and more living the life that Chris had secretly yearned for since he was young. Victoria even starts a little garden filled with herbs and begins listening to Joni Mitchell and singing in the shower. Chris feels like he’s home for the first time in his life. 

San Francisco is the last stop, and they live for a year in a little house near Golden Gate Park, and Allison learns about hippies and flower children and starts putting posters of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan on her walls. Chris likes this Allison, a child raised on peace and idealism. 

Normally they don’t buy a house, but Chris goes into the bank on the corner of the street and takes out a 30-year mortgage, and makes the payments early every month. 

\---

It happened, just once.

She was eighteen and he was a few days shy of twenty-nine and Kate had just gotten out of the shower in another nameless hotel and was wrapped in a terrycloth towel. She was a little bruised, but it was not a look he hadn’t seen her wear a dozen times before. Compared to how she normally looked after a fight, she was practically untouched. 

When she dropped the towel a moment later, he let himself say yes. 

That night was different. That night he pulled the trigger on his gun four times, watched an Alpha’s head explode into a thousand pieces. He didn’t have a real, honest-to-god Kill to his name at that point, a couple severed limbs here and there and a well-placed lie to his father about the condition of the hunted, but they always got up, always hobbled away before Chris could put them down permanently. 

She was pushy normally, but she let him back her onto the bed, let him undress her with his shaking hands without so much as a stuttered word of pressure. She was still growing into her body at that point, just a little bit, and he touched the sides of her swelling breasts, nuzzled her sternum until she whimpered. 

“Fuck,” she cried, hoarse when he dropped between her legs, pressed his fingers inside her. “Fuck, Chris.”

He thought about Victoria then, thought about the first time they did this. She was nearly silent when he rolled on top of her, and Chris had been finished after four or five strokes. She had left the room right after, gone to take a shower that she didn’t return from for at least an hour. Chris had sat in the mess of sheets, still a little bit hard and horribly empty. 

“Knew it would be good,” Kate murmured when he drew up her body. His hands clenched her breasts, and his breath rasped into her neck when he finally pushed in with steady thrusts that shifted the bed across the carpeted floor. “I knew you would be good, Chris. Knew it since I was fourteen.” 

He tried to pull out, right before he came inside her, but she didn’t let him. She pulled him into her chest, her arms strong around his back and her nails digging into his spine as she pushed her hips up, frantic. She didn’t scream when he forced his hand between them, but he did, and the neighbors banged on the wall as he caught his breath and rolled off her. 

When he tried to stand, to clean himself off, she hauled him back down to the dirty comforter and sucked him off with a practice mouth. When she kissed him afterward, he didn’t kiss back. 

\--- 

Chris doesn’t want to move back to Beacon Hills. He tries for years to keep away, but there are rumblings from other Hunters in the area, rumblings that something in the air that smells like innocent blood spilled into the ground. Chris feels a magnetic pulls back after that, and when his father calls, demanding his presence, he puts the house in San Francisco on the market the next morning. 

\---

When Laura Hale dies, Chris stops fighting his family.

Instead, he starts fighting for the life he was given and had tossed away. The guns he always kept but didn’t dare use in front of his daughter start being removed from storage and cleaned in the garage. He starts making calls to the local Hunters and to ones who are farther away but necessary to any full scale fight. Each one seems surprised to hear from him in the first place, and even more surprised to hear that he’s taking up offense-based training again, especially in lieu of his father’s presence on the Argent home. Victoria sits behind him when he’s on the landline, smiling, and Chris can feel the elation pouring out of her veins.

He had liked Laura Hale, much more than he was supposed to. In another life, she would have been the kind of girl he would have asked out for a drink, maybe kissed goodnight after he walked her home, hand-in-hand. As things are, she is the girl in the ground who he never really knew in the first place. 

He fights for Laura’s memory, for her sweet smile. 

\---

The condoms are the last straw.

“You’re here to Hunt, Kate,” Chris shouts when he slams the door to the guest room. He hopes that Victoria and Allison can’t hear him over the sound of the television in the living room. “So why are you stockpiling Trojans and leaving them out for my baby girl to find?” 

“You’re going to lecture me? When your precious baby girl was going through my stuff to look for a way to screw her little boyfriend?” Kate pushed him back. He notices her perfume, light and citrusy, something else new since she’s returned to Beacon Hills. “Didn’t know you were raising a little nympho, did you?” 

Chris doesn’t take the bait. “Who are you planning on having sex with?” he continues, pushing her against the door. “Dex? Maybe Cal? One of the young guys from your sick little Hunter pack?”

Kate smirks when Chris looks down at her. “I’m already fucking them,” she replies simply. “Part of the deal. You get a gun when you go down on me, bullets too if you make me scream.” 

“God Kate.” His hands tighten against his hips. “Why did you come back? Last time I heard you were in New York sniping pack leaders outside of Buffalo. Why couldn’t you just keep doing that?”

“Because you need to be reminded once and awhile,” she chides.

“Reminded of what?”

Her eyes glint, and, for just a second, he sees the little girl who killed the cat again. “It could be you again,” she says, pushing her hand up against him. He feels her nails against his cock, gripping to the point where it hurts. “It could always be you, Chris.” 

\---

It never occurs to him before the Sheriff’s kid says it. Maybe it’s because he’s always had that blind spot where she’s concerned, but when the kid says it, his hands trembling and his pretty eyes wide with fear, it makes perfect sense. Derek Hale was nothing more than a pawn to Kate, not even somebody she particularly want to fuck, but somebody who was necessary to a ploy to take down the only remaining werewolf threat in the area.

But that was just the problem: The Hales were many things, but a true threat was never one of them. They never ever toed the line, much less dashed across it. 

He thinks about Laura and her sad eyes when she stood on his porch and pushed her face against his chest. These days her face morphs into Kate’s when he pictures her, eyes moving from sad to sinister, and he suddenly he can’t breathe.

\---

A year ago, Chris would have been pleased to see his daughter date somebody like Scott McCall. Scott, who is soft-spoken and a little bit foolish and endlessly guided by a heart that beats for Allison alone, is a good person. Chris knows the type because he’s wanted to be that type his whole life. Scott McCall wants noting but good things for his daughter, and this is all that should matter to him.

As life is, Chris feels like he has to protect Allison from everything, even boys with brown eyes who would do anything to protect her.

\---

He lied to the Stilinski kid about killing his best friend. 

Buster was a distant relation of the Hales (everybody in a town as small as Beacon Hills is related, somehow), but he was a good man with a good heart. He and Chris sneak beers from the Argent fridge and drink them by the creek, skipping stones and generally trying to forget that their lives have been planned out for them. On nights of the full moon, they’d park in Chris’s pickup near the edge of the Hale property, maybe smoke a couple cigarettes and talk about Ashley Garnette, the pretty red-haired junior who wore skirts that were too tight and shirts that showed off her small, pink nipples when the light was right. 

He was not expecting it, when it happened. Buster had never been violent, was born a werewolf so he had control over the change in a way that others just don’t. But he’d been stressed with school and a mountain of college applications and the rift that had been slowly growing between his mom and dad, two wolves who used to love another, and just didn’t anymore.

That night felt different. Buster was irritable all day, and when the moon started peeking out behind the hills, Buster’s eyes shift to an electric yellow. Chris didn’t notice the change until he heard a growl, low, echo through the car. 

It happened almost too quickly to process from there. One moment Buster was lunging for him, and the next the car door swung open, and Chris was looking down the barrel of a shotgun. “Move!” his father barked, pushing Chris down, and pointing his gun right at Buster’s forehead. 

“Didn’t think we knew about your little wolfy friend?” his father said after he pulled the trigger. “You don’t think we know exactly how many times a day you are a failure at the one thing you were taught to be good at?”

The next thing Chris grasped was that he was sitting in the back seat of his father’s car, waiting like some juvenile delinquent en route to a holding cell. His shirt was bloody, but his hands were dry and clean. 

“You can make new friends,” his father said as his mother dragged the body into a ditch, burned it with lighter fluid and a disposable lighter.

\---

When Kate dies, Chris mourns in his own way, with a bottle of scotch and a couple joints he keeps hidden in his side drawer. Victoria picks out his clothes for the funeral, and pats him on the back when he stumbles from the combination of the booze and the pot.

It strikes him how much more loss he felt when Laura died, and he is both ashamed and proud of the person he's become. 

\---

Life goes on for the Argent family after Kate dies. Life always does.


End file.
